it's a homophone, dammit.

January 28, 2010

For the last couple of days, my friend Jason and I have been talking via email about Obama. Both of us supported him in the campaign, and both of us have been more than a little disheartened in the last few days. As I mentioned in my Tumblr yesterday, I still think this election-day tweet remains the truest thing I've ever posted to Twitter:

Moreso than Jason, I feel like we did stop. Or at least I did. Quite frankly: I was exhausted.

But on the other hand, I never felt like Obama gave us something to truly rally around. Had he sent his 13 million-strong list after one thing--it could be just about anything as long as it was something we could accomplish and take ownership of--during those first six months in office, I think he would have had a much better position to bargain from. It would have energized his supporters, and proved that he still had political capital. Indeed, it would have given him additional capital. He could have taken that to the healthcare fight, and it would have been a better bludgeon than anything the Republicans could cook up, with or without Glenn Beck.

But I don't feel like I've seen enough of Obama during the past year. And so it was good to see him come out swinging last night. I'm not a partisan. I don't care about the Democrats, but I do think the Republicans are bad for America. It seems like, even when they were in power, their only tactic was to divide us and make us hate each other. To split people apart and drive a wedge between us. That's unsustainable. But it's working right now. I was glad to hear Obama directly confront them on being the Party of No last night, but on the other hand, being the party of no is working very well for them. Why would they stop? This is what Jason wrote in response. I thought it was dead on, and so I asked him if I could post it here.

It is just so much easier for Republicans. All they have to do is play
into the public’s natural cynicism and low expectations, and convince
them that government does not and cannot work. So in a perverse way,
the Bush years work well for them because they’re such a stellar
example of why you can’t trust government.
The Dems historically, and O now, have such a tougher job, which is to
appeal to everyone’s hope and better angels and ask for the benefit of
the doubt to prove that government CAN work and do things that the
private market can’t. Of course they have to do this while the other
side is sewing as much distrust and bad faith as possible. It leaves
like ZERO margin for error, because the slightest misstep will be seen
as proof that the Repubs are right and government is terrible. At the
very least, it requires constant tending to message and process so
people have a constant sense that their government is working for them
and doing productive things. The way healthcare was managed just
totally destroyed this. On the one hand you had crazy right-wing
nutjobs saying the govt wanted to kill old people, which did two
things: 1) convinced some losers that they were right, but more
importantly, 2) made the whole health-care discussion so distasteful
and ludicrous that it made a lot of reasonable people not want to
engage with it at all. We needed a strong counterbalance, a constant
messaging campaign that, every step of the way, laid out the stakes and
appealed to our optimism and sense of purpose and feeling that we were
on the cusp of accomplishing something amazing. Instead, we got Max
Baucus and Joe Lieberman.
In other words, US politics’ default setting is with the GOP, because
it’s always easy to assume that things won’t work. It’s much more
daring and difficult to get people to believe that government can
actually pull something off that makes citizens’ lives better. When O
wants to, he can make that case better than anyone. Like you, I don’t
know why he hasn’t been doing it this whole time.

January 27, 2010

I’ve spent my professional career doing basically two things: making websites and making print media. It’s my hope that what Apple unleashes tomorrow is the device that finally bridges the two. Let me explain. Every content website I’ve ever worked on has proclaimed the death of print, but the truth is, they’ve all been secretly jealous of old media. Why? Consumers pay for print. Advertisers pay more for print. Print, for all its ink stains and dead trees still makes money. Meanwhile, every print organization I’ve ever worked with has been head-to-toe freaked about the web. The web is the hot, new thing that all the kids are excited about. And it really is better at moving information from one point to another (a sentence so obvious it feels stupid typing it, but believe me when I say it’s taken a decade for some print organizations to admit it). The problem for the web ventures has always been how to pay for it. And as someone who’s designed site after site hoping to get consumers to open their wallets, I can tell you: It’s not easy. Print still has a tangible, innate value. The web does not.

Derek's post is about the iPad pre-game, and we're all done with speculating
about that now, right?

And yet this passage really struck me. I've
spent the past twelve years jumping back and forth between print and
the Web. It's amazing to me that despite all that time, this tremendous
gulf still exists. I don't know what the future holds, or what the Tablet
iPad means but I do know that it's getting to be a narrower divide. For
the first time, it feels like both sides are really working hard on
these issues. Whether or not the iPad is a smash hit, or an utter flop
(and I think it will be the former) it's gotten people excited about
finally figuring it out. That energy and drive is just going to keep
going forward.

January 18, 2010

For any of these tracks: who is the beat’s composer? Is it Jerry Lordan, the Incredible Bongo Band’s rhythm section, Kool Herc or whichever DJ first had the idea to loop the break by itself, or the producer who did the sampling? What’s the connection between Jerry Lordan’s song, the Bongo Band version, the Sugarhill Gang’s recreation of it and Missy Elliot’s song sampling that? There’s no simple answer. Electronic music has this way of undermining the concept of the singular composer. It’s like asking what the origin is of my blue eyes.

Ethan has a lot of great posts, like this one on Apache, that take me on decades-long musical odysseys that I come away from feeling smarter.